MyDoom downs SCO site - The MyDoom computer virus knocked out SCO Group's Web site on Sunday, and the company expects the massive denial-of-service attack to continue until Feb. 12. On Monday, SCO began directing customers, developers and others to a new Web site, www.thescogroup.com, which it says will be in effect over the next two weeks. SCO said an onslaught of data had made its usual Web site, www.sco.com, "completely unavailable." The attack began Saturday night and by Sunday morning the software company's site was completely flooded with requests, Utah-based SCO said. ~ The Lindon, Utah-based Unix vendor on Monday announced that it had moved its Web site to www.thescogroup.com instead of its normal address of www.sco.com to avoid the worm-induced distributed denial-of-service attack

[!] Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (February 2004) - This update (MSIE 6SP1, MSIE6-Win2k3, MSIE6.0, MSIE 5.5SP2 ...) replaces the one that is provided in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-048, which is itself a cumulative update.

Microsoft releases metadata removal tool - MS Word is notorious for containing private information in file headers, but not any longer. Microsoft has quietly released a tool to scrub leaky metadata from documents edited with its software. The Remove Hidden Data Add-In will permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint files. For Windows XP/Office 2003 only, we should add.

Off-topic: Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles - The Wikipedia.org project to create a 'complete and accurate free content encyclopedia' has just surpassed 200,000 articles, an increase from 100,000 just 1 year ago. Join in on the celebrations.(thanks Slashdot.org)

Off-topic: Nanotech spy eyes life inside the cell  - In the real world, biochemists are hoping to go one step further, deploying viruses as "nano-cameras" to get a unique picture of what goes on inside living cells and a greater understanding of how viruses themselves work. A team led by Bogdan Dragnea at Indiana University in Bloomington is exploiting the ability of viruses laden with gold to break into cells, along with the viral shell's own telltale response to laser light. Together these give an unprecedented picture of the chemical and physical activity in cells.

Windows plan underscores Microsoft struggle - A move by Microsoft to extend support for an older version of Windows underscores a new reality for the software giant: Convincing customers to upgrade is becoming much more difficult. Earlier this month, Microsoft backtracked from a decision to end support for Windows 98 and other older Windows versions, pledging to continue support until 2006. While many customers applauded the move, some analysts said that the decision may be more than an act of goodwill. According to recent surveys, about one-quarter of all PCs run Windows 98 or older versions of Windows. "Better to have people stay on Windows 98 than to start investigating things like Linux," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

NV40 and R420 memory secrets revealed  - Nvidia’s upcoming NV40 and ATI’s R420 both support memory in the types DDR 1, GDDR 2 and GDDR 3, but both companies will be sticking with GDDR 2, at least at first.  The reason is simple: DDR 1 is just too slow to support the latest-generation graphics chippery in high resolutions, with fancy FSAA and Anisotropic filtering. Also, DDR 1 has a clock limit of 1GHz which is very hard to crank up further. DDR 2, of course, is nothing more than DDR 1 that can run at more than 1GHz, given a set of different commands.

Intel Introduces Intel Pentium 4 on 90nm - Intel is delivering four new processors (formerly codenamed Prescott) that are built on the company's industry-leading, high-volume 90-nanometer (nm) manufacturing technology.

Taiwan companies to make notebooks using desktop Prescott processors - Some second-tier Taiwanese notebook makers will roll out models using Intel desktop-use Prescott processors before the chip giant launches notebook-use Mobile Prescott processors in the second quarter of this year, according to sources.

What's wrong with the Intel Prescott? - It seems that, across most PC benchmarks and usual test apps, the Prescott performance on the same clock varies between 5% faster and 15% slower than the normal Northwood core, or never faster and like 25% slower compared to the Extreme Edition

Intel Pentium 4 E "Prescott" CPU review - In some cases, Prescott looks very good, but in others, it's slower than current Pentium 4 chips at the same clock speed. The larger caches and architectural tweaks have helped immensely in offsetting Prescott's super-long 31-stage pipeline, but they haven't entirely made up the gap. On balance, Prescotts are slower than Northwoods. I expect Prescott P4s will look relatively stronger over time as SSE3 instructions are adopted and, especially, as clock speeds ramp up. Another reviews can be found at AnandTech, Accelenation, HardOCP, HardcoreWare, MBReview , Legit Reviews, PCWorld, THG and VR-Zone.

MultiEx Commander 3.9.69 - MultiEx Commander (source code), the world's no.1 Multi game archive resource Extractor has been updated, with supported archive formats totalling 150. This new version adds suport for EA Cricket 2004 *.COB (Extract only), BloodRayne *.POD (Import), Syndicate Wars *.DAT (Import) and Sacrifice *.WAD (Extract only).

BlindWrite Suite 5.1.1 (SHW) - Blindwrite Suite (download) is the best set of tools to reproduce or clone any CD, even protected ones. Blindwrite Suite is the most powerfull tool to create a perfect copy from your original CD for personal private copy.

TheFlyDS 1.9.1 - TheFlyDS 1.9.1 (download) is MS DirectShow based software for watching and recording video and/or audio or snapshots from tv-tuner or video-in cards (such as AverMedia TV Phone, LifeView FlyVideo98, ATI All in wonder, ASUS Deluxe Combo and many others).